Every business, no matter how large or small, creates paperwork. From a work-at-home freelancer to a multi-million-dollar corporation, tax forms, receipts, business minutes and other forms of correspondence creates a dilemma: storage.

A wide range of business types, from medical institutions to law firms to offices, find themselves in need of long term data preservation. Traditionally, this has been accomplished via in-house file cabinets and off-site data storage facilities.

The age of big data isn’t all moonlight and roses. The sheer number of gigabytes being produced every day presents a problem that filters all the way down to your IT department. There are 2.5 billion GB of data generated daily. Content clutter is expensive. Searches cost an average of $14, 252 per employee annually, so storage solutions are a critical issue, not only for your budget, but your efficiency, too.

How you store your documents matters. Storing your company’s documents in a centralized document repository is a smart idea. It ensures that all of your documents are stored in a secured location, and that you won’t have to worry about any stray data ending up in the wrong place. It will also increase the overall efficiency of your document storage by making it easier to find documents and reducing the storage space needed to save everything (multiple storage solutions waste space, because many of them won’t be filled up).

Your business has routine tasks that must be completed daily, weekly monthly and quarterly. In order to ensure that these tasks are completed with maximum efficiency and reliability, you must put business processes in place. In order to effectively replicate and improve upon a business process, you have to document it. Process documentation, however, can be a rigorous, time consuming process that can seem like it just isn’t worth your time.

Using the right document management software is critical for your ability to effectively manage your digital documents. There are many features that your document management software should have (indexing, scanned document conversion, accounting capabilities, file searching, etc). Which specific features your document management software should have will vary greatly based on your organization's unique needs. One feature that all organizations should consider for their software is access to the cloud. Here are the reasons why you should think about using cloud document management software:

Many of your organization's documents include invaluable information that must be protected. To that end, you need to invest in the best available document security. However, before you do this, you need to actually store your documents somewhere so that they can be secured. In general, there are two options: on-site document storage and off-site document storage. Let's explore how each option affects your ability to maintain secure document storage.

For many businesses, the time and money needed to be invested into updating their file management system is perceived to be too great. Software, document conversion, training and other aspects are deemed too time-consuming or too complicated.

Once your company has started taking advantage of the benefits of modern technology by converting its paper documents to digital files, you will need a solution to manage it all. There are plenty of document management solutions out there, and the best among them are cloud based. Here is why you should choose cloud based document management systems over the alternative:

Much of your organization's data will matter as much in a decade as it does right now. As such, you need to explore long-term storage solutions to preserve it for as long as you possibly can. To assist you in this matter, we are going to explore the pros and cons of some of the most reliable long-term storage solutions available to you.